Living with Mortality

I have been a pharmacist since 1989. In that time I have counted out a great many tablets, and I have learned that a pharmacy is one of the places where people’s mortality quietly shows itself. A prescription changes. A dose goes up. A new medicine arrives with a long name and a short explanation. People rarely say, across the counter, “I am frightened of dying.” But the question is often there, folded inside a more practical one: Will this help? How long do I take it for? What happens if it stops working?

From 2002 to 2023 I was involved in health work in Thailand and along the Thai–Myanmar border, and I spent around fifteen of those years living in Chiang Mai. I lived among people whose beliefs about death were very different from one another. Buddhist teachers encouraged people to reflect calmly and regularly on aging, illness and death. Muslim families spoke of the life to come and of what would be asked of them there. Christian families spoke of resurrection and reunion. Animist traditions spoke of spirits, ancestors, and the places the dead belong to. And many people, in every tradition and none, were simply unsure.

Living among so many different answers to the same question made me wary of simple explanations. It is tempting to assume that belief removes fear and that unbelief brings despair, or the other way round. As this book will show, the evidence does not divide people so neatly. Confident believers can still be afraid. People who expect nothing after death can be at peace. And beneath the differences lie many shared, ordinary wishes: to be free of pain, not to be a burden, to know that the people we love will be all right, and to have enjoyed our days while we had them.

This book asks a question that most of us carry somewhere, even if we rarely say it aloud: how do I live with myself, knowing that I will end?

This academic edition sets out the philosophy and the research in detail, with references, so that readers can examine the evidence themselves. I have tried to distinguish what research can show from the questions that require philosophical argument. Both deserve to remain connected with the people asking how to live.

The illustrative situations in these pages are ways of thinking through a question, not disguised accounts of individual patients or families. Where the book discusses real places and organisations, its claims depend on the dated sources identified in the text.

I have not written this book to make death welcome, and I do not promise that it will make fear go away. What I hope it can do is loosen one particular demand: the idea that only what lasts forever is allowed to matter. If an ordinary afternoon, a conversation, a joke, or an act of care can be worth something even though it ends, then perhaps a life can be too.

Stuart Corlett

Carterton, New Zealand

2026